2021 Q3 Fabless Growth

Q3 revenues of the top ten fabless companies grew 45% y-o-y to reach $33.7 billion, says TrendForce.

Qualcomm has been buoyed by continuing robust demand for 5G mobile phones form major mobile phone manufacturers with further revenue growth from its processor and radio frequency front end (RFFE) departments.

Qualcomm’s IoT department benefited from strong demand in the consumer electronics, edge networking, and industrial sectors, posting revenue growth of 66% YoY, highest among Qualcomm departments. In turn, this drove Qualcomm’s total 3Q21 revenue to $7.7 billion, 56% growth YoY, and ranking first in the world.

Second ranked NVidia, is still benefiting from gaming graphics card and data center revenue as the annual revenue growth for these two primary product departments reached 53% and 48%, respectively. In addition, professional design visualization solutions only accounted for 8% of total revenue.

However, due to enduringly strong demand for mining and customers actively deploying the RTX series of high-performance graphics cards, NVidia’s product department revenue grew 148% YoY with overall revenue increasing by 55% to $6.6 billion.

Third ranked Broadcom’s main revenue stream came from their network chip, broadband communication chip and storage and bridge chip businesses driving revenue growth to $5.4 billion or 17% YoY.

Revenue of MediaTek’s mobile phone product line increased 72% YoY. Annual revenue of other product lines also posted double digit growth with total revenue in the 3Q21 reaching $4.7 billion or 43% YoY, a fourth place ranking.

AMD’s Ryzen, Radeon, and EPYC series of products in the fields of games, data centers, and servers performed well, driving total revenue to $4.3 billion, 54% growth YoY, and fifth place overall.

Novatek continues to focus on its two primary product lines of system-on-chip and panel driver chips. The proportion of its OLED panel driver chip shipments has increased, product ASP has risen, and shipments have been smooth with 3Q21 revenue reaching $1.4 billion or 84% YoY.

Realtek’s revenue surpassed Xilinx to take the eighth position due to higher priced Netcom chips in 3Q21.

Himax saw significant growth in its three main product lines of TVs, monitors, and notebooks due to large-size driver chips. Revenue from large-size driver chips increased 111% YoY, driving total revenue to exceed the $400 million mark, a 75% increase, and enough to squeeze onto this year’s ranking.

Q3 revenue for the top ten fabless companies has reached historic highs.

Rankings for the top 7 companies remained the same as in 2Q21 with change coming in ranks 8 to 10.